Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis
Published by UC Press in October 2021Gabrielle Selz
A revelatory and groundbreaking biography of Sam Francis, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists, and the American painter who brought the vocabulary of abstract expressionism to Paris. Drawing on exclusive interviews and private correspondence, Gabrielle Selz traces the extraordinary life of this complex and charismatic artist who first learned to paint as a former air-corps pilot encased for three years in a full-body cast. While still a young man, Francis saw his color-saturated paintings fetch the highest prices of any living artist. His restless desire resulted in five marriages and homes on three continents. His entrepreneurial spirit led to founding a museum, a publishing company, a reforestation program and several non-profits. With settings from World War II San Francisco to post-war Paris, New York, Tokyo and Los Angeles, Selz writes an intimate portrait of a man who sought to resolve in art the contradictions he couldn’t resolve in life.
Alicia Penalba ma première sculptrice
September 25, 2021Alicia Penalba (ma première sculptrice)
ALICIA PENALBA, VERS L’ENVOL
September 2021Frédérick Aubourg
Monographie présentant l’oeuvre de cette sculptrice née en Argentine et formée à Paris dans l’atelier d’Ossip Zadkine
Suite à sa disparition accidentelle en 1982, l’œuvre d’Alicia Penalba, sculptrice de renommée internationale, s’était retrouvé abruptement dans l’ombre. Née en Argentine, ce n’est qu’en 1948, âgée de 35 ans, qu’Alicia Penalba arrive en France, à son arrivée à Paris, diverses rencontres vont la conduire à la Grande Chaumière dans l’atelier d’Ossip Zadkine auprès duquel elle se forme et où, très rapidement, elle fait montre d’un talent certain. Elle y travaillera trois ans tout en étudiant ses aînés, Anton Pevsner, mais surtout Constantin Brancusi, qu’elle rencontrera à plusieurs reprises. À partir de 1951, elle se consacre exclusivement à la sculpture non figurative. À partir des années 60, son évolution artistique l’amène à réaliser des sculptures monumentales pour des projets architecturaux qui la conduisent à simplifier les volumes pour obtenir des formes épurées. L’air et la lumière vont alors devenir les fils conducteurs de sa quête artistique.
Cette monographie de référence rend hommage à cette grande artiste dont les oeuvres sont présentées dans la plupart des grands musées internationaux : le Centre Pompidou, la Fondation Pierre Gianadda, le musée Kröller-Müller, The Cleveland Museum of Art, le Hakone Open-Air Museum…
Cet ouvrage dont les textes sont écrits par Frédérick Aubourg sera préfacé par Pierre Wat (professeur d’histoire de l’art à l’université de Paris-I, historien d’art connu et reconnu).
Art Paris inaugure le Grand Palais Éphémère
September 8, 2021Le Quotidien de l'Art
La foire parisienne a une bonne étoile. Elle avait maintenu contre toute attente son édition 2020 sous la verrière du Grand Palais historique, devenant la dernière foire à s’y tenir avant travaux de restauration et elle inaugure aujourd’hui le Grand Palais Éphémère.
Par Stéphanie Pioda
The Hypothesis of Gravity
July 11, 2021 - January 10, 2022Musée du Louvre-Lens
The Hypothesis of Gravity is a monographic exhibition devoted to the contemporary artist Bernar Venet. This monumental work fills the 1,000 square metres of the luminous Glass Pavilion, reconfiguring the museum’s internal and external landscape.
Inside the Glass Pavilion are around one hundred corten steel beams in the form of Arches, Straight Lines, and Angles. Piled on top of each other in a jumbled accumulation on the floor, these sculptural and linear elements, simultaneously monumental and graphic, have collapsed in on each other.
In this work, Bernar Venet is putting forward the hypothesis of gravity as a formal proposition. Matter here is no longer governed by the forces of nature: the industrial motifs are arranged in a disordered way that recalls the spontaneous organisation of plants. The sculpture releases energy and a fierce beauty, offering visitors a physical and artistic experience of space that is poetic and unpredictable.
The work is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of matter, its capacity to resist and its reaction to gravity, and of the question of entropy, which is central to his work. The practice of piling and collapsing, and the use of random combinations as a form of creation, are essential to Bernar Venet’s work.
Pierre Matisse, an Art Dealer in New York
June 11 - October 4, 2021Musée Matisse Nice
Curated by:
Claudine Grammont
Hosting a large exhibition devoted to Pierre Matisse, the Musée Matisse revisits the exceptional career of Henri Matisse’s youngest son, a New York art dealer and a key figure of the 20th century art world.
For about sixty years, the Pierre Matisse Gallery played a prominent role in the art world: it tirelessly championed French and European modern art in the United States during a key period which saw the formation of major private and institutional American collections. The 300 or so exhibitions organised at the gallery allowed a generation of European artists to gain visibility and take part in the New York art scene.
Pierre Matisse applied himself to build his artists’ reputation and promote the American careers of major figures represented by the gallery: Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and Marc Chagall to name but a few. He supported individuals rather than movements like fauvism, cubism, surrealism or the School of Paris. Without claiming to be exhaustive, the exhibition Pierre Matisse, an Art Dealer in New York retraces this odyssey through the presentation of seventy artworks by twenty-three key artists of the gallery.
As underlined by Balthus, Pierre “saw things as a painter’s son”. The exhibition puts strong emphasis on the gallery’s publications as they testify to Pierre’s remarkable creative skill at designing these sometimes modest yet original publications. It also shows, through numerous installation views of the gallery that he curated and hung his exhibitions with great care too.
These two themes which are documented by a wealth of images of the gallery’s publications and exhibits are central to both the exhibition and the catalogue. The latter, published by Bernard Chauveau, brings together essays by Serena Bucalo-Mussely, Catherine Dossin, Fabrice Flahutez, Jack Flam, Claudine Grammont, Marianne Jakobi and Johanne Lindskog.
The exhibition includes major loans from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation (New York), the Ezra and David Nahmad collection and private collections. 15 masterpieces, donated in lieu of inheritance tax by Pierre Matisse’s heirs to the French state in 1991 and kept in the Musée national d’art moderne’s collection, have been generously loaned to the Musée Matisse, paving the way for a multiyear partnership agreement signed by the City of Nice and the Centre Georges Pompidou.
UNITED STATES OF ABSTRACTION
May 19- July 18, 2021 | August 6 - October 31, 2021Musée d'arts de Nantes | Musée Fabre Montpellier
The exhibition United States of Abstraction. American Artists in France, 1946-1964 explores the intense presence of American artists and how they helped redefine abstract art in France at a time when the global geography of art was in upheaval. It is generally considered that Paris lost its status as the art capital of the world after the Second World War, in favour of New York. However, from the end of the war, many artists, musicians and writers came to study and create in France. The exhibition explores the intense presence of these American artists and how they helped redefine abstract art in France at a time when the global geography of art was being turned upside down.
The exhibition is made up of about a hundred works, paintings and sculptures, from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, and is accompanied by numerous documents that provide an insight into the period.
This exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Fabre Museum of Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole which will host it from 6 August to 31 October 2021.
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes – read more
Musée Fabre, Montpellier – read more
Women in Abstraction
May 19, - August 23, 2021Centre Pompidou, Paris
The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s.
“Women in Abstraction” provides an opportunity to discover artists who represent discoveries both for the specialist and for the general public. It showcases the work of many of these women who suffer from a lack of visibility and recognition beyond the frontiers of their countries. Reviewing their specific contribution to the history of abstraction, the exhibition focuses on the careers of artists who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art.
GROUP SHOW | ALICIA PENALBA SE RÉVÈLE DANS “ELLES FONT L’ABSTRACTION”
May 19, - August 23, 2021Centre Pompidou, Paris
L’exposition propose une relecture inédite de l’histoire de l’abstraction depuis ses origines jusqu’aux années 1980, articulant les apports spécifiques de près de cent dix artistes femmes.
« Elles font l’abstraction » donne l’occasion de découvrir des artistes qui constituent des découvertes tant pour les spécialistes que pour le grand public. L’exposition valorise le travail de nombre d’entre elles souffrant d’un manque de visibilité et de reconnaissance au-delà des frontières de leur pays. Elle se concentre sur les parcours d’artistes, parfois injustement éclipsées de l’histoire de l’art, en revenant sur leur apport spécifique à l’histoire de l’abstraction.
Karel Appel 100
April 25 - October 24, 2021Musée d'Art Moderne CoBrA
On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Karel Appel (Amsterdam, 1921-Zürich, 2006), the museum opens an exhibition with the most beautiful works of Karel Appel from its own collection, supplemented with a number of special loans.
Serge Poliakoff in Germany
March 21, 2021 – July 21, 2021Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Museum Gunzenhauser
Serge Poliakoff
Accomplished peinture
This exhibition selects an important artist from the Dr. Alfred Gunzenhauser Collection: Serge Poliakoff. The artist originally came from Moscow. In Paris around 1950 he developed his own very distinctive formal idiom. Drawing on Cubism and the colour theories of Robert and Sonja Delaunay, he produced works that linger neither in geometrical stringency and analytical constructivism, nor in the informal free gesture. Instead, in his characteristic polygonal forms, he used the finest of colour nuances to create a tension. Form and colour blend into a harmonious tone as a result of their successive compaction in the centre of the image. The exhibition highlights Poliakoff’s artistic development by means of ten paintings from the Gunzenhauser Collection along with works from international lenders. The presentation traces an arc from his still figurative beginnings to his unmistakable abstract forms of expression. Poliakoff’s »serial« works are also focused on, for after stabilizing his pictorial idiom he then began to explore it tenaciously. Often he worked on several works at a time. Each painting goes further than its predecessor; each anticipates its successor. The works in the Gunzenhauser Collection are complemented by paintings the artist did around the same time. These »series« not only testify to Poliakoff’s insistence on the formal order he had developed, they also enable us to see the artist’s delight in variation.
Alexander Calder : Modern from the Start
March 14, 2021 - January 15, 2022MOMA New York
Alexander Calder reimagined sculpture as an experiment in space and motion, upending centuries-old notions that sculpture should be static, grounded, and dense by making artworks that often move freely and interact with their surroundings. “One of Calder’s objects is like the sea,” wrote the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “always beginning over again, always new.” Bringing together early wire and wood figures, works on paper, jewelry, mobiles in motion, and monumental abstract sculptures, the exhibition takes a deep dive into the full breadth of Calder’s career and inventiveness.
Calder’s ever-changing artworks invite a viewer’s sustained attention; and The Museum of Modern Art has provided a setting for this productive exchange ever since his work was first exhibited here in 1930, just months after the Museum opened its doors. This exhibition looks at Calder’s work through the lens of this connection. Throughout MoMA’s formative years, Calder, in his unofficial role as “house artist,” was called upon to produce several commissioned works—including Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a multicolored mobile that hangs in the same stairwell for which it was made in 1939. His works have been a mainstay of the Museum’s galleries and Sculpture Garden ever since.
Drawn from MoMA’s collection and augmented with key loans from the Calder Foundation, the exhibition celebrates one of the most beloved artists of the 20th century and presents rarely seen works, including the large-scale Man-Eater with Pennants, which will be on view in the Sculpture Garden for the first time in more than 50 years after new conservation.
Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, with Zuna Maza and Makayla Bailey, Curatorial Fellows, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Calder, Soulages, Vasarely,… Abstractions plurielles (1950-1980)
March 2 - November 21, 2021Musée d'art de Pully
Le Musée d’art de Pully collabore avec la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art autour d’une exposition consacrée à la peinture informelle des années 1950 à 1980.
Les années qui suivent la Seconde Guerre mondiale connaissent une grande effervescence artistique. Paris reprend rapidement sa place de capitale culturelle et attire des peintres du monde entier. La tendance géométrique, qui prend sa source dans les avant-gardes du début du XXe siècle, connaît alors de nouveaux développements. De nombreux artistes mettent l’accent sur le geste ou la matière, recourent à de nouvelles techniques et repensent la peinture et ses supports.
Composée d’œuvres issues de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art rarement présentées au public suisse, l’exposition propose un parcours original à travers la production bouillonnante des années 1950 à 1980, provenant des deux côtés de l’Atlantique.
Centrée sur les formes plurielles que prend l’abstraction au cours de cette période, elle montre les principales tendances : l’abstraction lyrique et gestuelle de Georges Mathieu ou de Hans Hartung, l’expressionnisme abstrait de Pierre Soulages ou de Sam Francis, l’abstraction géométrique de Victor Vasarely ou de François Morellet, ou encore la peinture minimale de Martin Barré, la sculpture cinétique de Jean Tinguely ou un monumental mobile d’Alexandre Calder. Quant au mouvemenent Supports/Surfaces, qui remet en question les moyens picturaux traditionnels, il marque à la fois une conclusion à cette période d’expérimentation intense et le début d’une aventure qui se poursuit aujourd’hui encore.
La Fondation Gandur pour l’Art a été créée en 2010 par Jean Claude Gandur, grand collectionneur d’art, afin de rendre accessible à un large public ses collections d’envergure internationale. Basée à Genève et reconnue d’utilité publique, la Fondation s’emploie à préserver, documenter, enrichir et exposer ses collections dans des institutions de renom en Suisse et à l’étranger.
Jean-Paul Riopelle : Catalogue raisonné tome 5, 1972 – 1979
January 2021Yseult Riopelle, Fondation Riopelle
Texte de Ray Ellenwood : Masks, the North and New Configurations – Les masques, le Grand Nord et les nouvelles configurations, 2017, suivi de Addendum: The Question of Cultural Appropriation – Addenda: La question de l’appropriation culturelle, mars 2019
Recherche et direction Yseult Riopelle et Tanguy Riopelle
Français/anglais. Plus de 1300 reproductions – 552 pages.
ISBN : 978-2-922623-04-8
Riopelle, the call of northern landscapes and indigenous cultures
November 21, 2020 - September 12, 2021Musée des Beaux-arts de Montréal
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is dedicating a major exhibition to Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), a towering figure in Canadian, Quebec and international modern art. Based on original research, the exhibition explores, the artist’s interest in the North and Indigenous cultures, with nearly 160 works and more than 150 artifacts and archival documents. It sheds new light on the artist’s work during the 1950s and 1970s by retracing the travels and influences that fed his fascination with northern regions and North American Indigenous communities.
The exhibition Riopelle: The Call of Northern Landscapes and Indigenous Cultures reveals an artist imbued with a Surrealist’ interest in non-Western art, as inspired by his friend and collector Georges Duthuit and the writings of anthropologists and ethnologists, such as Marius Barbeau, Jean Malaurie and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
It explores the influence of Riopelle’s hunting and fishing trips with Dr. Champlain Charest by seaplane to Quebec and Canada’s North and Far North during the 1970s, as evidenced in the series Jeux de ficelles (1971-1972), Rois de Thulé (1973) and Icebergs (1977). Using an intercultural approach, the exhibition offers a parallel between Riopelle’s works and some of the sources that inspired him, in particular a selection of Inuit masks and works of Pacific Northwest coast First Nations.
Victor Brauner
September 18, 2020 - April 25, 2021Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris
For its exhibition dedicated to that singular Surrealist Victor Brauner (1903–1966), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is publishing a monograph containing over a hundred paintings and drawings, some of them on show for the first time since the last Paris retrospective, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1972. The presentation sequence runs as follows: Beginnings in Romania (1920–1925); Paris and the shock of Surrealism (1925–1932); The Surrealist adventure (1933–1939); The «black frontiers» of the war (1939–1945); The Conglomeros (1941-1945); After the War (1946–1948); Beyond Surrealism (1949–1966).
Born in Romania, Victor Brauner knew at first hand the artistic ferment of 1920s Bucharest and the avant-gardes – Expressionism, Constructivism, Dada – whose radicalism so closely matched his independent spirit. From 1925 onwards regular stays in Paris, where he would settle definitively in 1938, saw his painting gradually shift towards Surrealism. By 1933 he had joined the movement and continued to take part in its activities until his exclusion by André Breton in 1948.
The loss of an eye in 1938 made his Self-portrait of seven years earlier a premonitory illustration of Surrealism’s theories and his painting a form of magic. Unable to migrate to the United States when war broke out, he had no choice – as a Jew, an undocumented foreigner and an opponent of all forms of fascist and totalitarian oppression – but to go underground in the South of France, where he sought to ward off constant danger via the esoteric doctrines of the tarot, alchemy, spiritism and the kabbala. In this dream world where reality no longer held sway, his work took on a mystery all its own. Paradoxically this time of fear and utter destitution was also one of great technical inventiveness, typified by his resort to wax and salvaged materials, and formal innovation.
The postwar period was marked by an exploratory succession of styles, attributable to his new-found liberty but powerless against the anguish and torment ambient events inspired in him. Other influences ranging from psychoanalysis to «primitive» thought made themselves felt in cycles – the Victors of his Onomatomania series, Les Rétractés («The Withdrawn»), Mythologies, Mothers’ Days – in which a newly invented language conveyed not reality but the invisible forces that drive the world.
The catalogue casts fresh light on Victor Brauner in contributions from writers and art historians including Georges Sebbag, Fabrice Flahutez, Radu Stern, Sophie Krebs, Camille Morando and Jeanne Brun.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is proud to announce that the catalog of the Victor Brauner exhibition ” Je suis le rêve. Je suis l’inspiration” has received the special mention of the Prix CatalPa 2020, awarded by the association Les Arpenteurs d’Expositions.
Black suns
June 10, 2020 - January 25, 2021Musée du Louvre-Lens
This sensory, poetic exhibition offers a fresh perspective on masterpieces of the History of art. Almost 75 years after the legendary exhibition ‘Black is a Colour’, it provides an engrossing exploration of this fascinating colour, which has been endowed with a multitude of symbolic meanings in Western art, from antiquity to the present day. A paradoxical colour, is black the absence of light, emptiness, a joyous amalgam of all the colours or something that dazzles ?
Right from the outset, visitors are immersed in a familiar experience of black thanks to artistic depictions of themes that have been omnipresent throughout the history of art, such as night with its dark sky. The colour of beginnings of every kind, and of infinity and timelessness, as well as of death and ignorance, black was a structural but ambiguous element in representations of the sacred. It aroused fear as well as fascination, both of which were sources of the melancholy sought by artists when revealing this colour’s beauty and sensuality in their works.
As a result, black became a colour that was emblematic of modernity in both industry and art. Imbued with a strong social dimension, black was a symbol of power and the colour of elegance, reflecting the codes adopted by fashion designers and artists.
Throughout the 20th century it was used increasingly freely, becoming a visual substance that was endlessly experimented with, as demonstrated today by the works of Pierre Soulages. Inspired by the flat slagheap on which the Louvre-Lens stands, the exhibition pays tribute to its mining past, images of which are dominated by coal and the infinitely nuanced traces it left.
The exhibition features nearly 180 works, intermingling periods and disciplines, and spanning painting, fashion, the decorative arts, the moving image and installations. Ranging from Velázquez and Ribera to 19th- and 20th-century artists such as Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Kandinsky, Malevich, Reinhardt and Soulages, together with creations by designers like Jeanne Lanvin and Yohji Yamamoto, ‘Black Suns’ explores the paradoxes of black and the myriad ways in which it has inspired artists, from Antiquity to the present day.
FEMMES ANNÉES 50. AU FIL DE L’ABSTRACTION
December 14, 2019 - May 10, 2020Musée Soulages Rodez
Depuis le 14 décembre 2019, le musée soulages consacre une exposition à la création abstraite des femmes dans les années 50 à Paris : Femmes années 50. Au fil de l’abstraction, peinture et sculpture.
Déjà aux Etats-Unis se tenait en 1951 l’exposition fondatrice « Ninth Street Show » dans laquelle figurait 4 femmes : Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning et Helen Frankenthaler. Dans L’autre moitié de l’avant-garde 1910/1940 de Lea Vergine, éditions des femmes, publication doublée d’une exposition en 1980 en Italie. : Lea Vergine parle de découvrir la « moitié suicidée du génie créateur de ce siècle ». En 2009, le Centre Pompidou offrait une importante exposition d’artistes femmes, « Elles » qui réunissait plus de 3 millions de visiteurs.
L’exposition présentera un ensemble de plus de 70 œuvres de provenance riche et variée : prêts d’artistes, de particuliers, d’institutions, de galeries, de fondations, de musées nationaux et régionaux (Centre Georges Pompidou – musée national d’art moderne, Fonds national d’art contemporain, musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, abbaye de Beaulieu en Rouergue, musée de Grenoble, Musées Royaux de Belgique, les Abattoirs-Toulouse, musée de Gravelines), des fondations (Hartung / Bergman, Marta Pan / Wogensky…), des galeries françaises et étrangères (Denise René, Antoine Laurentin, Convergences, Jeanne Bucher Jaeger , Callu Mérite…).
Soulages at the Louvre
December 11, 2019 – March 9, 2020Musée du Louvre, Paris
Pierre Soulages, “painter of black and light,” is a major figure of non-figurative painting, recognized as such since the start of his career after World War II. Born on December 24, 1919, in Rodez (south of France), Soulages, who continues to produce work at a steady pace, is celebrating his 100th birthday at the end of this year. To mark this event, the Musée du Louvre is devoting an exceptional exhibition to the artist in the prestigious Salon Carré, which is located between the Galerie d’Apollon and the Grande Galerie and used to house the Paris Salon.
This tribute exhibition traces the chronological development of Soulages’s work from 1946 to the present day, through a limited selection of pieces created over eight decades of artistic research. Soulages’s exceptionally long career is illustrated by some of his major works, most of them from prominent French and foreign museums. The exhibition covers every period, with a focus on the outrenoir polyptychs. It also presents a number of very large paintings executed in recent months, demonstrating the remarkable vitality of Soulages, who has never stopped working.